
Ron's Week'n'ADAM

      March 16, 1998


      Sitting here listening to a Seattle radio station, provided
via  cable for those of us north of the border who have no sense
of patriotism. KJR earlier this evening boasted, "(we're) from 
the city that gave the world the 747 and  Windows.."

      I think they're forgetting something. That same city also
gave the world Bart (Zonker) Lynch

      Haven't heard from him lately, but that's probably my
fault. I haven't spent much time in the Assylum since Christmas.
That's my loss mostly, but if I keep this up, Zonkman is going to
give up in disgust. Bart operates a full service, text based, BBS
known as the Assylum. He does this on a Coleco ADAM, hard drive 
equipped. The BBS offers an extensive message base, file areas, 
news bulletins, message threading, software downloads (specific-
ally for ADAM) and a way of contacting one of the most dedicated 
ADAMites on the planet. 

         (206) 859-2018

      That'll get him. The BBS operates 24 hours a day, 7 days a
week.  So if you want to catch up on the REAL ADAM chatter, the
Assylum is the place to go. Try it, you'll like it!

      The BBS Software that Bart uses is called PBBS 5.0. It has
been around the CP/M world for years, and furnishes a prime
example of the quality of software available to those who will 
take the time and trouble to learn CP/M (or TDOS, ADAM's CP/M 
workalike).   Many of the titles available on today's modern 
computers began as CP/M software first. There was Microsoft 
BASIC, Wordstar, Supercalc, DBASE II, and long list of utilities
that evolved along with changing hardware. These programs are 
still available for the ADAM. For most household applications 
they are still more than adqequate. 

      Detractors of CP/M and TDOS over the years have argued that
most of this available software doesn't work properly and is not
user friendly. The difficulties inherent in learning an operating 
system along with its cryptic syntax and unforgiving nature have 
detered many from making use of the full capabilities of ADAM.  
That coupled with the fact that neither TDOS nor CP/M offer much
in the way of graphics capability have been sufficient to keep
the majority of ADAM users away. These difficulties are real
and cannot be ignored. CP/M was an operating system that almost
required specialized training which most home users didn't have.  
It was considered to be more of a programmer's tool than a users'
environment, and as the debate raged in the mid-eighties, many 
ADAMites began to 'freeze' at the very mention of CP/M or TDOS.

      I'm not telling you anything new of course. My purpose here
is to restate, (once again) that for a computing device now
considered to be dead, there is still a very large quantity of 
unused potential available in the ADAM, potential that most users
will never take advantage of. 

      There's never enough time for this stuff of course. Life is
always in the way. I've had the MANX C Compiler and Turbo Pascal
3.3 loaded onto my ADAM hard drive for years, along with Forth
and even Cobol. I don't suppose there's any point in learning
any of these any more except for the pleasure and satisfaction to
be derrived from trying something new. I've heard it said that a 
BASIC programmer who learns Pascal will never go back to BASIC. 
I've also heard it said that there's really no point in learning 
anything other than C any more, and you may as well skip over the
earlier versions and go on with Visual C++. I've also read that 
Forth is the most fun for programmers who don't care much for 
following rules.

      I don't know if I really understand the subtleties of all
this. My task as a programmer, no matter what language I'm
writing in is to cause the computer to do useful work, get some 
data, process it in accordance with whatever method it's given 
and present the results. I need to know enough about what I am 
doing to present some kind of instruction to the user, get the 
user to input data, or perhaps read data from a media, and then 
do something with it.  
      Even if the objective is to entertain, the way of doing
business (input, process, output) doesn't change much. 

      I'm rambling. The point is this. The things I want to about
computing can be learned as well on an ADAM as they can on a 
pentium, which for me is why ADAM is not yet dead.


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